“New” Jews of the Agricultural Kind: A Case of Soviet Interwar Propaganda JONATHAN DEKEL-CHEN Ashifting and powerful whirlwind of propaganda campaigns engulfed the interwar Soviet Union. They were generated by the Bolshevik regime and aimed to exhort party activists and citizens for all sorts of mobilization. This article explores one such campaign: the promotion of an image of a “new” Soviet-Jewish agriculturalist in organized colonies throughout the USSR. The ensuing analysis of the background and operation of this campaign reveals that Soviet policy and practice was highly flexible, not uniform. In so doing, it joins recent Western studies that place Bolshevik actions in this era at a crossroads between domestic and international exigencies, ideological shifts, as well as Stalin’s personal caprice. 1 The focus below is on a number of questions arising from a comparison of the image of a “new” Jew with general Soviet propaganda from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. To what degree was the popularization of the image of a “new” Jew, in the Russian language, a subset of other Soviet modernization campaigns? Moreover, did the tipazh (“typicalization”) of the “new” Jewish farmer aboard his or her tractor in this campaign serve as a prototype for nationwide propaganda at the turn of the 1930s? Once we have situated the “new” Jew within the context of Soviet propaganda, we can assess whether this image helped to transmit vital messages in the official efforts to mobilize the rural population. Whatever the answers to these questions, we need to account for a striking resemblance Research for this paper was made possible through the generosity of the Research Scholar Program of the American Councils for International Education (ACTR-ACCELS), a Short-Term Fellowship from the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of the Woodrow Wilson Center, the John Fischer Scholarship from the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and YIVO’s Visiting Research Fellowship at the Max Weinreich Center. I thank the three anonymous readers of Russian Review for their remarks on this article. Their suggestions and criticisms have made it far stronger. All mistakes remain my own. A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “Images et représentations des Juifs dans la culture et la culture politique XIXe–XXe siècle,” in Paris, 2002. 1 For a sample see Ronald Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001). The Russian Review 66 (July 2007): 424–50 Copyright 2007 The Russian Review